By Juan C. Ayllon For some years, I volunteered as a sound engineer at church, where I was trained to adjust numerous settings, gain, and sliders to avoid clipping and yield a mix that best served our worship experience. Although one volunteer who'd toured with bands professionally preferred harder-edged mixes, for most working the sound board, the more natural sounding, the better. We often made EQ adjustments at various frequencies--attenuating this and enhancing that--to achieve that desired result, often ferreting out unexpected distortions on the fly. The crisp impact on the snare drum, the full-bodied thump of the toms, the rich timbre of the vocals, a full lower end, and the strummed acoustic guitar and their levels relative to one another were often key points of interest. With lead singers, we boosted effects, adding the warmth and resonance of a large cathedral, but muted them during spoken passages.
"Give me more sauce!" Carlos, a worship leader, often said during rehearsals (he really liked his effects extra thick). Without them, vocals lacked luster -- like eating a hotdog at Wrigley Field sans mustard and condiments.
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Photo and text by Juan C. Ayllon Last night while reading responses on Facebook to my new review of the Pass Labs X250.8 amplifier at Positive Feedback (you can read that HERE), someone wrote that they were big fans of Thomas "Hitman" Hearns -- whom I'd mentioned in the introduction while referring to his late trainer, Emanuel Steward of the acclaimed Kronk Gym, as a lead-in to Nelson Pass, who founded Pass Labs and holds similar status in high end audio. I shared some additional photos from my days writing and editing at the Cyber Boxing Zone (that's how I heard about Steward's influence and actually met him), and that got me thinking today, "whatever happened to the boxers and personalities I wrote about and got to know from my tenure at the CBZ?"
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Juan C. AyllonA writer, artist, educator and owner of Prairie Audio Man Cave, he lives with his wife, Isabel (AKA Belle), and their Goldendoodle, Liam, enjoys listening to high fidelity music and all things hi-fi at their home in the greater Chicagoland area.. Archives
March 2024
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